I’m putting together a list of classic articles and essays about science for a writing class I’m designing, and I’m a bit frustrated. I’ve read plenty of great stuff over the years, but the list I’m coming up with feels too short. So allow me to launch a comment thread: can you name an article or essay about science that you read years ago in a magazine or newspaper that still sticks with you? (No books allowed.)

Update: Just to be clear, I’m not looking for scientific papers.

Check out this scholarship for high school science teachers to learn tropical biology in Costa Rican jungles. Apply here. Get sweaty. Have a good time.

For my third post celebrating the Year of Science, I wanted to write about the secrets of nature that sit right in front of us, in plain view. By coincidence, I happened to be looking at the newest issue of Science and came across a paper about microscopic casks that float by the thousands in our cells, known as vaults. I looked for them in a cell biology textbook. Not there. So I wandered the Tubes and found some papers on line as well an excellent web site about vaults at UCLA. I discovered that scientists haven’t yet figured out what they do.

There are, of course, lots of things about our cells that scientists have yet to figure out. But the blatant obviousness of vaults makes them a stark example of how hard answers are to come by in science. Check out my post.

Update: Thanks to Science European news editor John Travis for pointing me to an article he wrote on the mystery of vaults in 1996. Thirteen years later, he’s still waiting for the mystery to be solved. A question: are vaults mysterious because they’re hard to understand, or because they’re not considered sexy enough for people to get funded to do the necessary research?

[Image source: Kato et al, "A vault ribonucleoprotein particle exhibiting 39-fold dihedral symmetry," Acta Crystallogr D Biol Crystallogr. 2008 May 1; 64(Pt 5): 525–531]

At a recent meeting of biologists, a friend handed me a piece of paper that had been folded into eighths, with hand-drawn pictures and writing about biology. Why…it’s a zine, I thought. It came from the Small Science Collective, which has put together lots of foldable booklets about science that they encourage you to download for free and leave on your bus, at your favorite coffee shop, or anywhere else you might want to spread knowledge about bot flies (and about lots of other science almost as cool as bot flies). And if you want to join the collective, they want to hear from you.

Well, it’s 2009, and my first blog post over at the Year of Science web site is up. I explain why I think this is such a cool image.

I’ve been reading some new blogs, and thought I’d share a few of them–

Culture Dish by science writer Rebecca Skloot, just moved to scienceblogs.com

monkey’s uncle  by Stanford anthropologist James Holland Jones.

Sex, Drugs, and Rockin’ Venom by Brian Fry, who studies the evolution of snake venom. I wrote two pieces for the New York Times about Fry (here and here). But reading his blog, I feel like I’m just getting to know him.

These, and many more, are listed in the blog roll. Anybody reading any particular good new blogs about science?

The National Academy of Sciences has a survey they’d like people to fill out to help them figure out what kinds of educational materials about science, engineering, and medicine they should publish in print and on the web.

I just took it, and can assure you it’s quick and painless. And along the way they pointed me to some pdf’s that look helpful.

Update: In case my linking above wasn’t clear, here’s the survey.

Attention, lovers of science: clear your 2009 calendar.

The Coalition On The Public Understanding of Science (COPUS), a grassroots network, is putting together a massive celebration of science stretching across all 12 months of the year. Museums, scientific societies, and other groups will be presenting lectures, science cafes, special blogs,  exhibits, and the occasional Banana Slug String Band concert. Every month will have a theme, from evolution (February, the month of Darwin’s birthday) to astronomy (July, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the summer Galileo first trained his telescope to the sky). And if you want to join the happening, COPUS wants to hear from you.

I’ll be helping to kick off the festivities in January. That month’s theme will be the nature of science, and I’ll be guest-blogging each week on the subject.

I’ll also be participating in the Year of Science’s big launch at the beginning of January. At the 2009 meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Boston, there will be a series of talks. If you belong to a group registered with COPUS, you can register at the meeting for all the COPUS events for $25.

Here’s the schedule–

JANUARY 3, 2009 7:00 p.m. – Ira Flatow, host of NPR’s Talk Of The Nation: Science Friday, opens the meeting with a plenary presentation emphasizing the importance of public understanding of science. Grand Ballroom, Concourse Level, Westin Boston Waterfront

JANUARY 5, 2009

12:00 to 12:45 p.m. – Launch of the Understanding Science Web site with Ken Miller and Natalie Kuldell. In concert with the Jan. 6th launch actvities, the new Understanding Science web site will be unveiled to the scientific community, introducing an exciting new paradigm for explaining the process and nature of science. Lewis Room, Westin Boston Waterfront

1:00 to 3:00 p.m. – “Communicating Science in Year of Science 2009: Science Blogging, Science Cafés, and Science Festivals.” Lewis Room, Westin Boston Waterfront (three sessions are as follows:)

1:00 p.m. “Off the Page: Blogging About Science” led by Carl Zimmer, Science Writer, The New York Times
1:40 p.m. “A Scientist Walks Into a Bar: Reaching New Audiences with Science Cafes,” led by Ben Wiehe, Outreach Project Director, WGBH Educa tional Foundation
2:20 p.m. “Celebrating science and technology in the community: the Cambridge Science Festival” led by John Durant, Director, MIT Museum, Executive Director, Cambridge Science Festival

6:30 to 8:30 p.m. – YoS09 Launch Science Café and Celebration: join COPUS leadership, hub members, and scientists for food, drink, and fun as we celebrate together! We’ll recap the kick-off events and make plans for the great themes coming up in the next few months: Evolution in February and Physics and Technology in March…some big anniversaries and birthdays to engage! Location: “Cambridge, 1. Fenway” at 1381 Boylston Street, http://cambridge1.us/

JANUARY 6, 2009

6:30 to 7:30 p.m. – “Into The Jungle: Great Adventures in the Search for Evolution and What Students Can Learn From Them,” Sean Carroll, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Harbor Ballroom, Westin Boston Waterfront

Barack Obama has picked Steven Chu, director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at Berkeley as his Secretary of Energy. This will be interesting–what happens when you put a Nobel-prize winning scientist in charge of a government department? Here’s one prediction: expect a lot of synthetic biology. Practically nobody has heard of synthetic biology today, but that will probably change.

On Friday I wrote about how good science fiction (at least to my tastes) often relies on bad science. I was glad to see my ravings triggered a lot of responses over the weekend, both here and abroad at sites like Science Made Cool and io9 (see the comments to their first and second posts). There’s no way I could respond to all the comments, but one in particular stuck in my memory–

Tim Bryon wrote:

I think Carl has a fundamental misunderstanding of what science fiction is – it’s not fiction about science per se, or necessarily fiction with accurate science (what about Jurassic Park?It taught me as an 11 year old about raptors) but fiction about the way advances in technology and knowledge might influence our lives (well, it’s more complicated than that, but anyway). In my mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the perfect science fiction movie. It’s vaguely plausible that neuroscience will advance to a state where the memory deletion in that movie is possible, and the ramifications of the technology are central to the story and well thought out.

I liked Eternal Sunshine too, and just fired it up on Netflix’s instant viewer to recall why. (Dangerous…must stop watching movies during working hours…) I don’t want to ruin the movie for those who haven’t seen it; suffice to say that the crux of the movie involved Jim Carrey going to a doctor to have memories of his relationship with Kate Winslet erased. But midway through the procedure he changes his mind and tries to hold onto his memories.

Tim thinks that I just don’t understand that science fiction is supposed to make us think about how advances in technology may alter our lives, and that Eternal Sunshine makes us consider the dangers of letting neurologists wipe out targeted memories. I just can’t see the movie that way. The “science” is intentionally silly–a low-rent doctor’s office filled with a bumbling dysfunctional staff. It’s just a way for the movie to get inside Jim Carrey’s head and create all sorts of wonderful images of how we assemble our lives from memories, and how terrifyingly sad it can be to forget them. Watching Winslet fade out of Carrey’s life reminds me of deep losses of my own, and offers the consolation that movies at their best can offer. I’m glad that the people who made Eternal Sunshine were able to produce such a wonderful story by riffing on neuroscience, but I’m also glad that they didn’t get hung up about the science itself.

Here’s a clip from Hulu…

I was in New York yesterday to give a talk about evolution, which was simultaneously a Rockefeller University Science and Media Series Lecture, and a New York Skeptics Society Public Lecture. We had a great turn-out: as I told the crowd, there’s nothing a public speaker likes to see more than a serious fire hazard. The talk was recorded, and I’m hoping soon to be able to direct you to it.

One of the many reasons I enjoy giving these lectures is that I can meet people before and after my talk. Yesterday I met a number of interesting folks, including Alexis Gambis, who somehow manages, all at once, to pursue a Ph.D. by researching neurons, make science-themed movies, and even run a festival of science movies. We got to talking about movies and science–there is a lot of buzz these days about how scientists can get involved in the movie-making process. The National Academy of Sciences has even dispatched emissaries to Hollywood “to help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines.”

Scientists who get involved in these kinds of projects hope to do some good. They hope that they can get rid of misleading representations of science in movies, and help movies to convey what science really tells us, or what science really is. (This is my impression from speaking to these folks and reading some of their blogs, etc. If you’re one of those scientists, leave a comment to tell me if this is wrong.)

When I get on this subject, as I did with Gambis yesterday, I turn into a raging skeptic. It’s probably not a very helpful response, and I’m not sure why it gains so much momentum inside of me. But I started raving yesterday. My favorite science fiction movies generally deal in some really, really bad science. Laws of physics are regular flouted. Aliens make no physiological sense.

That’s because the directors are just using fragments of science to assemble fiction that reaches down deep inside us, not to our internal database of scientific facts, but to our addiction to beautiful images and human stories. Science fiction movies are not really about science. I just watched Wall-E and liked it very much, not because I learned about robotics (I didn’t), but because the movie’s creators paid close attention to how Buster Keaton made love stories. On the other hand, I watched GATTACA years ago and found the science side relatively clever and the plot as tedious as a tax form. You can’t just add good science to Hollywood like pixie dust and get good movies.

I do think it’s great for scientists to help steer Hollywood away from pernicious myths about science. But there are limits to how far this fact-checking can go. Another grad student who was talking with Gambis and me yesterday complained about how bogus forensics is on CSI. Results of DNA tests just pop up in minutes. He complained about all the people who would crowd around a machine waiting for the results–”All that hair!” he said in horror.

Fair enough. But let’s imagine CSI with all the tedium and dreariness that goes into good forensic work. Tonight on CSI: our heroes wait for results. And wait. And wait! Next week: the samples were lost, so our heroes have to run the test again! We watch movies and TV shows to escape reality, not to be enslaved by it.

I will also grant that Hollywood can find huge amounts of inspiration in science. I myself ended up writing about science because it was far weirder than things I could think of myself. But (yes, there’s always a but) I think a good Hollywood director can find inspiration in economics, politics, crime, and the lives of bored housewives. What matters most, however, is whether the director knows how to turn the raw ingredients into a good story.

Once I was done with this riff with Gambis, I wondered if I was making any sense. Perhaps there’s a kind of science-based movie that transcends my skeptical take. By eerie coincidence, I just got an email from Netflix saying that with my Mac I can now watch an unlimited number of free movies on my computer. I’m now scanning through their science fiction collection (everything from Contact to Plan 9 From Outer Space) to conduct a little “research.” In my heart of hearts, I know that what I’m really doing is setting up my own professional downfall, because I’m going to watch movies all day long. But if anyone thinks I’m totally off the mark, please suggest to me a movie that proves me wrong.

[Image of Buster Keaton: Silent Gents' Buster Keaton Gallery]

Last night I strapped on a bow tie and shot out my tuxedo cuffs, got in the car, and headed to the upper West Side to celebrate a global cataclysm. Actually, I was helping to celebrate the geologist who discovered the cataclysm. Walter Alvarez was receiving the Vetlesen Prize, the highest honor in the earth sciences.

Under the magnificent rotunda at Columbia’s Low Library, we sat down to dinner. Michael Purdy, the director of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, kicked off the event by explaining that Alvarez was winning the award because he had changed the way earth scientists view the history of the Earth. Later, Columbia president Lee Bollinger got up to present him with the award, declaring that Alvarez had shown how life was intimately connected to the cosmos. The real highlight of the evening, however, was listening to Alvarez himself.

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